People are sometimes wrong, and we at Utopian understand that. Whether your faults are intentional or an unfortunate turn of events will always impact the way we look at your case and at the punishment we choose.
Today, a bit about account suspension on Utopian and how it's fair and consistent no matter who you are.
What does it mean to get suspended?
Utopian, unlike other web applications you might be familiar with, doesn't currently have a way to restrict you from posting thanks to operating fully on the Steem blockchain. Because of that, if your account is suspended, you will be notified of the suspension and its expiry date and all of your posts before this date will not be considered for an award. Because of that, we suggest you abstain from posting for as long as your suspension is valid.
Creating new accounts to dodge account suspension can lead to permanent suspensions of all of your accounts.
If you are suspended and disagree with the decision or are unsure about why and how it was made, feel free to contact us - read my post about our support here. Everyone makes mistakes, so do we - we'll always look into your case twice.
Consistency is the key to a fair system.
We, Community Managers at Utopian, have a lot of freedom when it comes to interacting with the users. Our CEO trusts us and knows that we all mean well for the platform, so judging on a case by case basis used to be commonplace when it came to specific contributions or account suspensions. While we always had the best intentions for the platform, it turned out that some of us were more harsh than others, which led to plagiarism sometimes being a 1 month ban, but in other cases prevented you from accessing Utopian permanently. This is just a single example of the issue.
Clearly, this was not a fair system - sure, plagiarism is bad. We hate it at Utopian. But everyone makes mistakes. Nearly everyone deserves a second chance. Furthermore, it was just unfair that some people would get off in once month while others could never come back to our platform. Because of that, with help of me and @espoem, consistent account suspension rules were born.
How does Utopian judge the cases?
Based on the fault you commit, your account will be suspended for a given amount of days. If you repeat your mistake in the close future, your ban will be a bit longer to ensure that this time you learn your lesson. Some things might initially only lead to a timely suspension, but if repeated will have all of your accounts permanently disallowed on Utopian.
Furthermore, a vast majority of wrongdoings doesn't lead to account suspension immediately! Some minor things will prevent you from receiving the reward on a given contribution but will not lead to bans unless you refuse to learn and repeat the same error over and over again. A good example would be 'Contributions submitted in a wrong language (not English).' that only leads to short account suspension if you do it twice in a short amount of time.
Scaling Capabilities
Even though no systems are permanent (unlike some of our suspensions), the ones we develop are always aiming for one thing - scalable design. Similarly, the rules we chose are easily adjustable, are fair in all contexts and rely on Community Managers, or someone in their position, to decide whether they should be enforced or not. After all, it's Community Managers who have the final say in whether an account should be suspended or not, the Guidelines lead them to correct answers, but also enforce the duration of the suspensions which is non-negotiable by the person enforcing a ban.
The Utopian Account Suspension Guidelines are constantly evolving and are surely going to change for when Utopian 2.0 is released, but they're the best we've got at ensuring you and other users are all on an even playing field. This is all I wanted to share with you today! For now, I'll need to leave you hanging until the next post of #iamutopian, where I share some more insights about how Utopian operates!